Kids Church in Big Church

A few weeks ago at Northland we had the pleasure of hosting our kids church services in the main worship room for our weekend services.  Big church, as the kids call it, is a little different than our children's church.  Although both of our services have a primary goal of helping us grow closer to God, we do it in very different ways.  To give you an idea of a normal kids church weekend have a look at the pictures below.

As you can probably tell, this is normally loud and rambunctious.  They do a time of worship, an amazingly themed skit that acts out a portion of the gospel, and small groups that build on that.

So we essentially tried to replicate this amazing atmosphere.  Below is a picture of one of the worship songs. that lead into our service.

The theme for this month skit is about spreading the gospel throughout the universe.  We follow our space explorers as they work through how to serve others and share the gospel.

For the set for this special weekend, we decided that we should try and re-create Skylab Omega (our spaceship in kids church).  George came up with a plan to fly trusses on angles like the outline of the deck on a space ship.  We also layed out some of our Mega-lite LED frames to give it a futuristic look.

One of the coolest special aspects of this design was the space teleporter.  We built a pulley system that raises a "teleporter" that the actors appear in.  Our teleporter is built as a 5' x 5' box that attaches to our pulleys.  From this box, we hung clear 4 mil plastic.  We used a fog machine to fill the tube with smoke and the actors climb out of the teleporter.  One of the coolest aspects is how the actors appear.  They navigate under our stage to an existing trap door.  They remove the trap door and climb a small step ladder, making it look as though they appear out of thin air thick smoke.

It was a pretty fun service, below are some more pictures.

All the amazing lighting design was done by George and Denise.  I am so lucky to be able to work with such a great team.

Battle of the Bands 2012

Every year Northland hosts the Battle of the Bands.  We produce a DVD of each bands live performance. The winning band also gets $300 and to head-line a show at the church in the summer. This year's Battle of the Bands was awesome! We had some amazing bands and we built and projected onto one of my favorite sets we have ever done. Our original concept was to build a set comprised of different sized video screens that could be mapped individually with separate content.  Below is some of the information on what we came up with this year.  Enjoy!  

Last year we built a huge set and covered it with moving lights (Encore Concert).  This year we wanted to go with a much cleaner look.  We still wanted to have lots of flexibility though.  That's why we decided to do projection.  We built a bunch of projection surfaces to map to.  Here are some pictures of the construction and pre-planning.

We built the frames out of 2x4s that we pre-cut and painted white.  We then covered the frames with white muslin.  We spent about $200 on lumber and $200 on fabric.  We used 120" White Muslin to cover our frames (our widest frame was 10' for this reason).  Our original plan was to use spandex, but it was going to end up 3 to 4 times the fabric cost.  We used staples to attach the fabric and taped the edges to keep them clean.  We added self tapping eye hooks to attach the screens.  We hung the screens from our upstage truss with safeties and heavy duty carabiners.

Since the idea was to keep the set nice and clean, we did our best not to block it with moving lights.  Thus, as you can see we made some nice layers of depth by placing our lights at different levels on the stage.

Our next step was to focus the projectors and make masks.  Below you can see us mid-way through lining up the projector merge.  You can also see the merged output with a solid white graphic coming from the server.

The pictures above are taken very near the lens of the projectors.  I merged these pictures to create our mask in a program called Paint.net (like free simple photoshop).  I merged the 2 photos to 2048 x 768.  That is the resolution of 2 DL-2 images side by side, so I figured that would be close. Once I had my merged image, I loaded it into the server to test and make sure it all aligned.  The photo did not align correctly, but with a little global scaling and positioning, I got it into position.  

Once it was close I started the process of tweaking the masks.  This required moving a few of the panels in, and a few down.  I used the magic wand and cut features to move the panels in the photo.  I did this then, re loaded it to the server.  It took me 7 times to get an acceptable match.  Each time I would cut out a slight portion or move a panel a bit, then upload and try again.  Here is a snapshot of that process.

One very important thing is to make sure each panel is on a separate layer.  This enables you to turn off and on panels to make masks that contain singular panels, odds vs evens, and even grouped ones like the ones below.  

Above you can see the finished full mask.  I used a dimmer effect in conjunction with the 4 partial masks to make the really cool effect in the video below.

Below are some pictures from the I Am Third youth worship service the Wednesday before.

Below are some pictures of some of the looks we came up with for Battle of the Bands.  You can also see the Midi keyboard we used for strobes, hits, and some of our movement effects.

To end, here is a video of the set in action from Wednesday.  I am glad we could serve the Lord with this set.

Easter 2012

Our 2012 Easter service was a big departure from previous years.  In previous years, our lighting department has had a larger budget for rental.  Even with this, I think we made a huge impact on the worship environment at Northland.

As you can probably see from the pictures above, we used a lot of set pieces and drape.  

One of our larger elements was some scenic boxes we built.  Below is a picture of the finished product.

Each of our scenic panels was made of 3 2x4s, 1 sheet of black Coroplast, 1 sheet of white Coroplast, and 3 1x4s for trim.  We built our scenic frames by making 2"x4" frames that measured 4'x8.  We painted the boards black first then assembled the frames with drywall screws (see below).  You can also see Mike and James helping with the painting craziness. :)

Above are the finished frames.  We attached our cut black coroplast to these frames.  We cut the black coroplast into 1.5 - 2.5 inch strips.  You can see some of the attached strips below. 

We attached strips in criss crossing patterns.  First on the top then on the bottom like below.

I think the opposing strips give some awesome depth.  Once we were at this point we added a full sheet of white Coroplast on the back, like below.  We used 12mm Staples to attach the coroplast and razors to trim off the excess material.

Above is one of the frames finished (except for the trim).  We nearly left them without the trim.  They look nice and pretty clean even without trim.  For the trim, we cut 1x4's at a 45 degree angle and painted them with a Oak stain.  Unfortunately I don't have any nice close ups, however you can catch the idea from the picture at the top.

We lit the scenic panels with 3 cell strip lights from the back and Colorblasts from the front on an angle.

Here is a link to order Coroplast if you are trying this.  You can also pick it up at a local sign shop, for cheaper.  Everything else can be picked up at a local hardware store.

We also rented some Molten Lava fabric from Dazian Fabrics.  Below is a close up picture of it.  It takes light amazingly, especially when lit from multiple angles.

We rented some Colorblaze 72's to light the bottom of the fabric, and side lit the fabric with 10 of our Colorblast 12s.  Below are a few of the wonderful looks George made. 

We also did environmental projection this year.  We setup 4 DL-3s at FOH and projected on the walls that surround the sanctuary.  The main purpose however for these projectors was to project a scripture we had on the Kabuki in front of the stage for the opening.  Below are some pictures.

For Easter this year, we opened with a video telling of Mary coming to find the tomb empty.  We hung 10'w x 34'h White fabric from 6 kabuki selenoids.  After the video finished we drop the fabric in black.  It revealed our Easter set.

Below are some more pictures from Easter.  Hope this helps you in your desire to serve the lord.